Heroic Fantasy – Fabulous Realmshttps://ashsilverlock.com
Worlds of Fantasy, Folklore, Myth and Legend
Fri, 22 Feb 2019 13:55:58 +0000 en
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The Epic of Gilgameshhttps://ashsilverlock.com/2019/01/13/the-epic-of-gilgamesh/
https://ashsilverlock.com/2019/01/13/the-epic-of-gilgamesh/#respondSun, 13 Jan 2019 02:00:37 +0000http://ashsilverlock.com/?p=1892Gilgamesh, the famous Mesopotamian hero, is believed to be based on a real person, who was most probably a Sumerian king. The Epic of Gilgamesh, a poem recording the hero’s exploits, was transcribed onto tablets in the second millennium BC. He is portrayed in sculptures and reliefs from every period of the region’s civilisation as a robust, bearded warrior, who struggles with lions, bulls and assorted monsters. He owes his immortality to the great epic poem that was written about him – the very first such literature known to humankind. Far from being a mere relic, the Gilgamesh epic is one of the most dramatic stories ever told. Even today, 3,500 years after its composition, its themes of friendship, loss and the fear of death have profound resonance. In Sumerian times, the epic must have enthralled its readers or, more often, its listeners – for in a society where only a small number were literate this poem was surely written to be read aloud.

Gilgamesh was two-thirds god, one-third man. Despite his heroic stature, he began his reign as a tyrant, whose people were eventually driven to call on the gods for help in subduing him. The deities responded by creating another man called Enkidu, who turned out to be a wild and savage being, even more troublesome than Gilgamesh. Eventually, it was Gilgamesh who helped the people of Uruk to hatch a plot whereby they succeeded in taming the wild being. Enkidu subsequently became Gilgamesh’s friend and constant companion, and the two men lived a life of luxury together. In time, however, Gilgamesh was instructed by the gods to leave his home in order to fight Khumbaba, the horrible monster who lived some 20,000 marching hours away from Uruk at Cedar Mountain. Enkidu and Gilgamesh set off on their quest and, after entering the cedar forest, eventually found Khumbaba’s home, Gilgamesh challenged the monster to battle and, after a fearsome struggle, the two men overcame him, although it was Enkidu’s spear that struck the fatal blow. Soon afterwards, the goddess Inana tried to seduce Gilgamesh. When the hero turned her down, she complained to the god Anu, who was eventually persuaded to give Inana the bull of heaven to send against Gilgamesh. However, Enkidu caught the bull and Gilgamesh stabbed it to death. The gods, outraged that the bull had been killed, took their revenge by striking Enkidu down with illness. After a few days, he died.

Gilgamesh was devastated at the death of his friend, and became terrified at the thought of death. He decided to try and discover the secret of immortality and set out on a quest to find Utnapishtim, the hero who, after surviving the flood, had been granted immortality by the gods. When he reached Mount Mashu, Gilgamesh was confronted by the scorpion men who guarded its gates. However, they recognised that he was in part divine and let him pass by them into the mountain. At last the hero reached Utnapishtim and Gilgamesh told him: “Because of my brother I am afraid of death; because of my brother I stray through the wilderness. His fate lies heavy upon me. How can I be silent, how can I rest? He is dust, and I shall die also and be laid in the earth forever.” The hero of the flood told Gilgamesh that death, like sleep, was necessary for humankind. To prove his point, he told Gilgamesh to try staying awake for six days and seven nights. Gilgamesh agreed, but fell fast asleep almost as soon as he had sat down. The tale ends on a sad note, with the ghost of Enkidu telling Gilgamesh on his return home of the misery of life in the underworld.

]]>https://ashsilverlock.com/2019/01/13/the-epic-of-gilgamesh/feed/0gilgameshashsilverlockLords of the Skieshttps://ashsilverlock.com/2018/12/16/lords-of-the-skies/
https://ashsilverlock.com/2018/12/16/lords-of-the-skies/#commentsSun, 16 Dec 2018 02:00:28 +0000http://ashsilverlock.com/?p=1883In Tolkien’s Middle-earth, the eagles were immense flying birds that were sapient and could speak. Often emphatically referred to as the Great Eagles, they appear, usually and intentionally serving as agents of eucatastrophe or dei ex machina, in various parts of his legendarium, from The Silmarillion and the accounts of Númenor to The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. Just as the Ents are guardians of plant life, the giant eagles are the guardians of animal life. In The Silmarillion, they were described as the noblest of the winged creatures of Arda, for they were brought forth by two mighty Valar: Manwë, Lord of the Air, and Yavanna, Queen of the Earth. The Great Eagles were numbered among the most ancient and wisest of races. These birds were always messengers and servants of Manwë. Over all the azure world they flew, like lords of the skies – for they were the eyes of the Valar, and like thunderbolts fell on their foes. In the First Age, a mighty breed of this race lived in Beleriand. These Eagles were far-famed for their deeds in the War of the Jewels. Their lord was Thorondor, said to have been the greatest of all birds, whose wingspan was thirty fathoms and whose speed out-stripped that of the fastest wind.

The difference between ‘common’ eagles and Great Eagles is pronounced, as described in The Hobbit: “Eagles are not kindly birds. Some are cowardly and cruel. But the ancient race of the northern mountains were the greatest of all birds; they were proud and strong and noble-hearted.” The eagles possessed a notable characteristic that distinguished them from other birds in early writings. Tolkien originally described Eä, the World, as bounded by the Walls of Night, and that the space above the surface of the Earth up to the Walls was divided into three regions; common birds could keep aloft only within the lower layer, while the Eagles of Manwë could fly “beyond the lights of heaven to the edge of darkness.” The question of the Great Eagles’ nature was faced by Tolkien with apparent hesitation. In early writings there was no need to define it precisely, since he imagined that, beside the Valar, “many lesser spirits… both great and small” had entered Eä upon its creation; and such sapient creatures as the Eagles or Huan the Hound, in Tolkien’s own words, “have been rather lightly adopted from less ‘serious’ mythologies”. In the last of his notes on this topic, dated by his son to the late 1950s, Tolkien decided that the Great Eagles were common animals that had been “taught language by the Valar, and raised to a higher level—but they still had no fear.”

The Eagles fought alongside the army of the Valar, Elves, and Men during the War of Wrath at the end of the First Age, when Morgoth was overthrown. In The Silmarillion it is recounted that after the appearance of winged dragons, “all the great birds of heaven” gathered under the leadership of Thorondor to Eärendil, and destroyed the majority of the dragons during a battle in the air. Tolkien mentioned the eagles in his accounts of the island of Númenor during the Second Age. He stated that three eagles guarded the summit of Meneltarma, appearing whenever one approached the hallow and staying in the sky during the Three Prayers. The Númenóreans called them “the Witnesses of Manwë” and believed that these eagles had been “sent by him from Aman to keep watch upon the Holy Mountain and upon all the land.” When the Númenóreans had finally forsaken their former beliefs and began to speak openly against the Ban of the Valar, it was in the way of eagle-shaped storm clouds, called the “Eagles of the Lords of the West”, that Manwë tried to reason with or threaten them.

In the Third Age, Gwaihir the Windward ruled over the Eagles of Middle-earth. Though he was not the size of even the least of the Eagles of the First Age, by the measure of the Third Age he was the greatest of his time. Gwaihir’s people, the Eagles of the Misty Mountains, were fierce and much feared by the Dark Powers. In the War of the Ring Gwaihir, with his brother Landroval and one named Meneldor the Swift, often advanced in battle with the Eagle host. They helped defeat the Orcs in the Battle of Five Armies. They rescued the Wizard Gandalf and the Hobbit Ringbearers and fought in the last battle of the War of the Ring before the Black Gate of Mordor. The idea of the Eagles transporting the Ring to Mount Doom, or at least part of the way, is not discussed in The Lord of the Rings and Tolkien himself apparently never specifically addressed it, except in an oblique manner. In The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien, he stated: “The Eagles are a dangerous ‘machine’. I have used them sparingly, and that is the absolute limit of their credibility or usefulness. The alighting of a Great Eagle of the Misty Mountains in the Shire is absurd; it also makes the later capture of G. [Gandalf] by Saruman incredible, and spoils the account of his escape.”

Different adaptations of Tolkien’s books treated both the nature of the Eagles and their role in the plots with varying level of faithfulness to originals. The first scenario for an animated motion-picture of The Lord of the Rings proposed to Tolkien in 1957 was turned down because of several cardinal deviations, among which Humphrey Carpenter recorded that “virtually all walking was dispensed with in the story and the Company of the Ring were transported everywhere on the backs of eagles”! The Rankin-Bass animated version of The Hobbit portrayed the eagles as similar in physique and appearance to the harpy, crowned or monkey-eating eagles of the tropics, while Jackson’s trilogy provided a more traditional interpretation, with birds similar to the golden eagle. In The Lord of the Rings film trilogy directed by Peter Jackson, these creatures are 6 m (20 ft) tall with a maximum wingspan of 23 m (75 ft). A notable deviation from the book is that Gandalf summons Gwaihir to Orthanc with the aid of a by-passing moth (the role of Radagast was not included in that trilogy, although he later turned up in The Hobbit films). The same moth also appears to him before the Eagles arrive at the Battle of the Morannon, and a similar sequence of events is played out in Jackson’s first instalment of The Hobbit trilogy. In the films, like the books, they are used sparingly, as guardians, heralds and, every once in a while, dei ex machina on the side of our heroes.

]]>https://ashsilverlock.com/2018/12/16/lords-of-the-skies/feed/1main-qimg-f6e9f155ee86da30de85fe1f4ae5e33d-cashsilverlockThe Wolf in the Attichttps://ashsilverlock.com/2016/08/21/the-wolf-in-the-attic/
https://ashsilverlock.com/2016/08/21/the-wolf-in-the-attic/#commentsSun, 21 Aug 2016 02:00:30 +0000http://ashsilverlock.com/?p=16251920s Oxford: home to C S Lewis, J R R Tolkien and, in Paul Kearney’s novel The Wolf in the Attic, Anna Francis, a young Greek girl looking to escape the grim reality of her new life. The night they cross paths, none suspect the fantastic world at work all around them. Anna lives in a tall old house with her father and her doll Penelope. She is a refugee, a piece of flotsam washed up in England by the tides of the Great War and the chaos that trailed in its wake. Once upon a time, she had a mother and a brother, and they all lived together in the most beautiful city in the world, by the shores of Homer’s wine-dark sea. But that is all gone now, and only to her doll does she ever speak of it, because her father cannot bear to hear. She sits in the shadows of the tall house and watches the rain on the windows, creating worlds for herself to fill out the loneliness. The house becomes her own little kingdom, an island full of dreams and half forgotten memories. And then one winter day, she finds an interloper in the topmost, dustiest attic of the house. A boy named Luca with yellow eyes, who is as alone in the world as she is. That day, she’ll lose everything in her life, and find the only real friend she may ever know. Kearney’s is a great Oxford novel; and the wonderfully conjured period detail – Tolkien and Lewis in particular stand out – is given added resonance by the long and complex real-life friendship on which it is partly based.

When Tolkien attended a meeting of the English Faculty at Merton College, Oxford, on 11 May 1926 among the familiar faces a new arrival stood out, a heavily built young man in baggy clothes who had recently been elected Fellow and Tutor of English Language and Literature at Magdalen College. This was Clive Staples Lewis, known to his friends as ‘Jack’. At first the two men circled warily around one another. Tolkien knew that Lewis, though a medievalist, was in the ‘Lit’ camp and thus a potential adversary, while Lewis wrote in his diary that Tolkien was a ‘smooth, pale, fluent little chap’, adding ‘No harm in him: only needs a smack or so’. But soon Lewis came to have a firm affection for this long-faced, keen-eyed man who liked good talk and laughter and beer, while Tolkien warmed to Lewis’s quick mind and the generous spirit that was as huge as Jack’s shapeless flannel trousers. Since early adolescence Lewis had been captivated by Norse mythology, and when he found in Tolkien another who delighted in the mysteries of the Edda and the complexities of the Volsung legend, it was clear that they would have a lot to share. They began to meet regularly in Lewis’s rooms in Magdalen, sometimes sitting far into the night while they talked of the gods and giants of Asgard or discussed the politics of the English faculty.

Lewis’s conversion to Christianity marked the beginning of a new stage in his friendship with Tolkien. From the early 1930’s onwards the two men depended less exclusively on each other’s company and more on that of other men – an enlarged circle of friends who formed the group that was known as The Inklings. The Inklings have now entered literary history, but they were no more and no less than a number of friends, all of whom were male and Christian, and most of whom were interested in literature. There was no system of membership, but Lewis was the invariable nucleus, without whom any gathering would have been inconceivable. Besides him and Tolkien, among those who attended before and during the war were Lewis’s brother, Warnie, Owen Barfield and Hugo Dyson. Although it was a casual business, there were certain common elements to each meeting. The group would meet on a week-day morning in a pub, generally on Tuesdays in the Eagle and Child (known familiarly as ‘The Bird and Baby’), and also on Thursday nights in Lewis’s big Magdalen sitting-room. On these occasions, tea would be made and pipes lit, and then Lewis would boom out: “Well, has nobody got anything to read us?” Someone would produce a manuscript and begin to read it aloud – it might be a poem, or a story, or a chapter. Then would come criticism: sometimes praise, sometimes censure, but soon the proceedings would spill over into talk of all kinds, sometimes heated debate, and would terminate at a late hour.

By the late 1930’s the Inklings were an important part of Tolkien’s life, and among his own contributions to gatherings were readings from the still-unpublished manuscript of The Hobbit. When war broke out in 1939 another man was recruited to the group of friends, Charles Williams, and his arrival marked the beginning of a third phase in Tolkien’s friendship with Lewis, a gradual but inevitable cooling on Tolkien’s part. Tolkien had a complex attitude to Williams, of whom he once said: “We liked one another and enjoyed talking (mostly in jest)” but he added “We had nothing to say to one another at deeper (or higher) levels.” He also wrote of a ‘dominant influence’ that he believed Williams came to exercise over Lewis, of which he did not approve and of which he may even have been slightly jealous. The two friends grew further apart as a result of the intrusion of a number of other things in the next two decades: the outbreak of war, Lewis’s time in Cambridge, mutual fortune and fame due to the world-wide success of The Hobbit, The Chronicles of Narnia and The Lord of the Rings, and more mundane matters such as family, marriage and careers.

Even after Tolkien retired from the Merton Professorship in the summer of 1959, he still saw a little of Lewis, making occasional visits to the ‘Bird and Baby’ and to the Kilns, Lewis’s house on the other side of Oxford. He and Lewis might conceivably have preserved something of their old friendship had not Tolkien been puzzled and even a little angered by his old friend Jack’s marriage to Joy Davidman, which lasted from 1957 until her death in 1960. Some of his feeling may be explained by the fact that she had been divorced from her first husband before she married Lewis, some by resentment of Lewis’s expectation that his friends should pay court to his new wife – whereas in the thirties Lewis, very much the bachelor, had liked to ignore the fact that his friends had wives to go home to. Nevertheless, a few days after Lewis died on 22 November 1963, Tolkien wrote to his daughter Priscilla: “So far I have felt the normal feelings of a man of my age – like an old tree that is losing all its leaves one by one: this feels like an axe-blow near the roots.” Tolkien himself passed away on 2 September 1973 and he, like his lifelong friend, was buried in Oxford, not far from the graves of their fellow Inklings, Hugo Dyson and Charles Williams, all united in death as their imaginations united, if ever so briefly, in life.

]]>https://ashsilverlock.com/2016/08/21/the-wolf-in-the-attic/feed/113126869_1035046023242033_1448103828_nashsilverlock3293557_homepage_blog_horizontal18tolkienpic-superJumboSongs of Earth and Powerhttps://ashsilverlock.com/2016/05/22/songs-of-earth-and-power/
https://ashsilverlock.com/2016/05/22/songs-of-earth-and-power/#respondSun, 22 May 2016 02:00:13 +0000http://ashsilverlock.com/?p=1608Greg Bear (born August 20, 1951) is an American writer best known for science fiction. His work has covered themes of galactic conflict (the Forge of God books), artificial universes (The Way series), consciousness and cultural practices (Queen of Angels), and accelerated evolution (Blood Music, Darwin’s Radio, and Darwin’s Children). Greg Bear has written 44 books in total. His most recent work is the Forerunner Trilogy, written in the Halo universe. Greg Bear was also one of the five co-founders of the San Diego Comic-Con. While most of Bear’s work is science fiction, he has written in other fiction genres. Songs of Earth and Power is an omnibus edition of two classic fantasy novels from the eighties. In The Infinity Concerto (1984) Michael Perrin endures years of captivity and deadly struggles in the Realm of the Sidhe, a fantastic, beautiful and dangerous world. In The Serpent Mage (1986) he returns to Los Angeles – but the Sidhe are following him. Greg Bear’s land of elves is not the pretty, enchanted place of so many fantasy novels but is an oppressive, menacing land of cruelty and fear, ruled by the unfeeling fair folk of Celtic mythology. His brilliantly descriptive narrative draws the reader in until you feel part of this world. Songs of Earth and Power isn’t an easy or comfortable read but it is one that is well worth the effort.

Michael Perrin wants to live the simple life of an aspiring poet in Los Angeles. Then Michael is left with the key to an old abandoned house by an elderly and mysterious neighbour. What Michael is about to discover is that this house is a gateway to another realm, the Realm of the Sidhe, a realm that is both compelling and dangerous, a realm that is difficult to escape from. Once he receives the key and a piece of music called The Infinity Concerto, Michael’s life becomes anything but simple. Soon he is whisked away to the land of the Sidhe, dangerous elves in a tentative truce with humans. Barren and stark, this world is anything but the pretty land of faerie tales. When Michael is released from the land of the Sidhe, all he wants is to lead a normal life in LA. But there are hauntings in the streets, bodies in a hotel, and an ancient creature summoned from a loch. Like the fairies of myth, the Sidhe are not willing to let go of their hold on Michael quite so easily. The first book, which follows the journey of Michael through the Realm and towards his destiny, is essentially a coming-of-age tale set in an alien world of myth and magic. The second book is about Michael as a man and tells of his journey to discover the depths of his self and his potential and the path to harmony with the energy of the world around him.

As always with Greg Bear, this novel (even though it consists of two separate books, this is really one story) is at once well-written, detailed, nuanced and thought-provoking. The nature of energy, magic and the worst traits of both humanity and the Sidhe are explored, as well as the prejudice and the concepts of gods, creation, religion, destruction and politics all are to be found within the pages. Magic is created in the forms of songs of power which may take the form of any of the great arts – music, dance, poetry. The story tells of the boy Michael’s rise to Magehood through his talent for poetry, leading to the destruction of the realm and the return of the Sidhe to Earth. Despite these serious themes the book also has a charming child-like quality which is difficult to convey, as it tells of first love, innocence lost and the power of music to stir the soul and change the world. Appealing to lovers of classical music, fairy folklore and science fiction in equal measure, Songs of Earth and Power is quite simply unique and unforgettable among fantasy novels – read it or miss out on an experience like no other!

]]>https://ashsilverlock.com/2016/05/22/songs-of-earth-and-power/feed/0bear_songs_of_earth_and_power_2009ashsilverlockEnter the Dragonhttps://ashsilverlock.com/2015/01/11/enter-the-dragon/
https://ashsilverlock.com/2015/01/11/enter-the-dragon/#commentsSun, 11 Jan 2015 02:00:36 +0000http://ashsilverlock.com/?p=1485The dragon Smaug is in many ways the centrepiece of both The Hobbit book and film series – no other character more often dominates covers, calendars and promotional art related to the story. It is no accident that a dragon plays such a prominent role in one of J R R Tolkien’s very first works of fiction – he did, after all, once famously say: “I desired dragons with a profound desire”. For Tolkien’s taste, however, there were too few dragons in ancient literature, indeed by his count only three – the Miðgarðsorm or ‘Worm of Middle-earth’ which was to destroy the god Thor at Ragnarök, the Norse apocalypse; the dragon which the Anglo-Saxon hero Beowulf fights and kills at the cost of his own life; and Fafnir, who is killed by the Norse hero Sigurd. There are elements of all three of these mythological dragons in Smaug, as well as some entirely of Tolkien’s own making, such as the dragon’s name. Tolkien once noted that Smaug bore as a name the past tense of the primitive Germanic verb smúgan (to squeeze through a hole) – “a low philological jest”, as Tolkien himself put it, from an Oxford professor of Anglo-Saxon and Norse.

Whilst the first dragon referred to above was too enormous and mythological to appear in a story on anything like a human scale, the second appears to be a more plausible prototype for Smaug. Tolkien was of course a prominent critic of and expert on Beowulf – indeed he described the poem as one of his “most valued sources” for The Hobbit. Many of Smaug’s attributes and behaviour in The Hobbit derive directly from the unnamed “old night-scather” in Beowulf: great age; winged, fiery, and reptilian form; a stolen barrow within which he lies on his hoard; disturbance by a theft; and violent airborne revenge on the lands all about. However, although this dragon had some good touches it remained speechless and without marked character. For the most part, then, Tolkien was left with the third dragon, Fafnir. In the Eddic poem Fdfnismdl Sigurd stabs it from underneath, having dug a trench in the path down which it crawls – this is perhaps one of the “stabs and jabs and undercuts” which the dwarves mention while they are discussing “dragon-slayings historical, dubious, and mythical” in chapter 12 – but Fafnir does not die at once. More telling are the following twenty-two stanzas in which the hero and the dragon engage in a conversation, from which Tolkien took several hints.

The first hint is that in the Eddic poem Sigurd, to begin with, will not give his name, but replies riddlingly, calling himself both motherless and fatherless. Tolkien entirely remotivates this, explaining “This of course is the way to talk to dragons…No dragon can resist the fascination of riddling talk”. Sigurd’s motive was that Fafnir was dying, and it was the belief in old times that the word of a dying man had great power, if he cursed his enemy by name. Tolkien took a second hint from Fafnir’s wily and successful attempt to sow discord between his killers, for Fafnir gives Sigurd unsought advice that his ally Regin will betray him. In the same way Smaug tells Bilbo to beware of the dwarves, and Bilbo (with less reason than Sigurd) is for a moment taken in. There is a third hint after the dragon is dead, for Sigurd, tasting the dragon’s blood, becomes able to understand bird-speech, and hears what the nut-hatches are saying: that Regin does indeed mean to betray him. In The Hobbit, of course, it is the thrush who proves able to understand human speech, not the other way round, and his intervention is fatal to the dragon, not the dwarves.

At any rate Tolkien was certainly well aware of the one famous human-dragon conversation in ancient literature, and seems to have admired the sense it created of a cold, wily, superhuman intelligence (or ‘overwhelming personality’, as Tolkien’s himself once put it). What he did so cleverly was to take the hints above and in many ways improve upon them. Much of the improvement comes from a kind of anachronism, which as so often in The Hobbit creates two entirely different verbal styles. Smaug does not, initially, talk like Beorn, or Thorin, or Thranduil the elf-king, or other characters from the heart of the heroic world. He talks like a twentieth-century Englishman, but one very definitely from the upper class, not the bourgeoisie at all. His main verbal characteristic is a kind of elaborate politeness, even circumlocution, of course totally insincere (as is perhaps so often the case when one is confronted with the English upper-class!) but insidious and hard to counter. “You seem familiar with my name”, says Smaug, with a hint of asperity – after all, being ‘familiar’ is low-class behaviour, like calling people by their first names on first meeting – “but I don’t seem to remember smelling you before”. This is nothing like Fafnir, or Sigurð, or indeed any character from epic or saga, but it is convincingly dragon-like nonetheless: threatening, cold, and horribly plausible.

Getting rid of Smaug remained, perhaps, Tolkien’s major plotting problem in The Hobbit, and here his ancient sources were not much use to him. Thor’s son Viðar kills the Miðgarðsorm by putting one foot on its lower jaw, seizing the upper jaw, and tearing it in half. There seemed no likelihood of anyone in Middle-earth following suit. Beowulf’s self-sacrificing victory and death, meanwhile, would involve creating a ‘warrior’, a character undeniably and full-time heroic, difficult to fit into what was still essentially a children’s novel. Tolkien solved his problem by creating the character of Bard, who in some ways resembled a figure from the ancient world of heroes. The Bowman prides himself on his descent from Girion, Lord of Dale. He re-establishes monarchy in Laketown, which till then seems to have been a kind of commercial city-state. The proof of Bard’s descent lies in an inherited weapon, a black arrow, which he speaks to as if it were sentient, and as if it too wanted vengeance on its old master’s bane. It is this arrow, of course – shot by Bard, but directed by the thrush, and ultimately by Bilbo – which kills the dragon, in a way not entirely dissimilar to Sigurd or Beowulf. In a manner entirely suited to the world of heroic myth, victory over the dragon in the end turns on a single man and an ancestral weapon.

Interestingly, the various depictions of Smaug in motion pictures have not departed significantly from the original text of The Hobbit, so evocative and memorable was Tolkien’s description of the dragon. For instance, in the 1977 animated version of the novel, Smaug’s design is in general consistent with Tolkien’s description (save for his oddly lion-like face). He is, however, accurately portrayed by showing lights shining forth from his eyes whenever he is searching for something – in the novel this effect was described by Tolkien as “a sudden thin and piercing ray of red from under the drooping lid of Smaug’s left eye”. In Peter Jackson’s live action adaptation, meanwhile, Smaug is presented as a fairly typical fantasy dragon, with a long head, red-gold scales, wyvern-like body and piercing yellow-red eyes. However, very much in keeping with the conversation between Smaug and Bilbo in the novel, the dragon speaks in the stentorian tones of an upper-class Englishman, with an underlying growl from the classically trained British actor Benedict Cumberbatch. For me this just goes to show what a superb, original and captivating creation Smaug was – not only a distillation of the mythological dragons which had come before him but the archetype for all the fantasy dragons that were to come afterwards.

]]>https://ashsilverlock.com/2015/01/11/enter-the-dragon/feed/8hobbit-Smaug-howeashsilverlockhobbit-Smaug-howeMan and Supermanhttps://ashsilverlock.com/2013/07/06/man-and-superman/
https://ashsilverlock.com/2013/07/06/man-and-superman/#commentsSat, 06 Jul 2013 02:00:15 +0000http://ashsilverlock.com/?p=1160With the recent release of Man of Steel, the mind naturally turns to the superhero genre. Whilst this is mostly characterised by larger-than-life comic book heroes like Superman, possessed of extraordinary powers and abilities, the term superhero is actually far wider than this and stretches back to long before the debut of the Man of Steel in 1939. Mankind has always been intrigued by tales of those who possess superhuman attributes – Classical mythology is full of stories of heroes like Hercules (superpower: strength), Odysseus (superpower: intelligence) and Cassandra (superpower: clairvoyance). What were the likes of King Arthur, Merlin and Robin Hood if not early superheroes? With the dawn of the printed book, the protagonists of many early literary works were also often extraordinary in some way, whether it was in the form of the fantastical adventures they had (see Gulliver or Baron Munchausen), their deductive genius (see Sherlock Holmes or Hercules Poirot) or their dazzling charm and rugged durability (see Allan Quartermain or James Bond). With such an august literary and mythic heritage, it is clear that tales of superheroes are far more than a genre of children’s fiction, fit only for comic books and cartoons. Maybe it’s because everyone craves stories where the good guy wins and evil is vanquished. Or maybe something inside each one of us just wants to believe that a person really can fly.

The ‘superheroes’ of antiquity were usually characterized, first of all, by a stirring, quasi-religious origin story. It is often forgotten that Gilgamesh of Uruk was in all likelihood a real person, so compelling has his myth become down the ages. His origins are suitably mythic in grandeur: in Aelian’s story, the King of Babylon, determined by oracle that his grandson Gilgamesh would kill him, so he threw him out of a high tower. An eagle broke his fall, and the infant was found and raised by a gardener, eventually becoming king. The Celtic hero-king Finn McCool, abandoned at birth, was raised by the warrior woman, Liath Luachra, who brought him up in secret in the forest of Sliabh Bladma, teaching him the arts of warfare and hunting. Achilles, the legendary Greek warrior, was the son of the nymph Thetis and Peleus, the king of the Myrmidons. When Achilles was born Thetis tried to make him immortal, by dipping him in the river Styx. However, he was left vulnerable at the part of the body by which she held him, his heel. This origin tale signposts another feature of the classical superhero. No matter how mighty they become, almost every hero has a fatal flaw or weakness that ultimately leads to their death or downfall (in Achilles’ case it was an arrow shot at his, you guessed it, Achilles’ heel). This, among other aspects, seems very much to have been retained in many modern superhero legends, not least of which is that of Superman, whose weakness is kryptonite.

Let’s look at some other common characteristics of superheroes. Many display extraordinary powers or abilities which can vary widely but commonly include some combination of the following: superhuman strength, the ability to fly, enhanced senses, and the projection of energy bolts. Some superheroes, while possessing no ‘super’ powers as such, have mastered skills such as martial arts and forensic sciences to a highly remarkable degree – Batman is probably the best example in this category. Others have special weapons or technology, such as Iron Man’s power suits or Green Lantern’s power ring. Many characters supplement their natural powers with a special weapon or device (e.g. Wonder Woman’s lasso and bracelets, Spider-Man’s webbing, and Wolverine’s adamantium claws). Of course, if special weapons and powers were all they had, there would be little to separate a superhero from a supervillain, which is why having a strong moral code and/or motivation is another essential aspect of such an individual. Whether it is Batman or Spiderman’s desire to avenge the deaths of their respective parent-figures or simply a strong in-built sense of right and wrong in the case of Superman, this moral compass is what puts the humanity into these otherwise ‘superhuman’ characters. This marriage of extraordinary ability and morality is, I feel, what really makes a superhero. Other aspects, such as having a secret identity, distinctive costume, sidekick and hidden base of operations, are all more or less window-dressing.

Of course, there’s one other thing that no true superhero can exist without, and that’s a supervillain. The very best superheroes are distinguished by a veritable rogues gallery consisting of enemies that they fight repeatedly (and it must be pointed out, in most cases unsuccessfully, given their penchant for repeat offending). In some cases superheroes begin by fighting run-of-the-mill criminals before supervillains surface in their respective story lines – this is almost a throwback to the days of Arthur Conan Doyle, whose hero Sherlock Holmes defeated countless common or garden criminals before meeting his match in the form of the ‘Napoleon of Crime’, Professor Moriarty. In many cases the hero is in part responsible for the appearance of these supervillains (characters in Batman’s comics often accuse him of creating the villains he fights, most famously the Joker). Often superheroes have an arch-enemy who is especially threatening – often a nemesis is a superhero’s doppelganger or foil. Again the Moriarty or Blofeld template is evident in this. Batman’s intimidating exterior persona hides a benevolent and noble soul, while the Joker’s comic appearance masks internal corruption and evil. Likewise, Superman’s perfect foil, and the source of many of his finest stories, is not an equally powerful alien, but a human criminal mastermind in the form of Lex Luthor.

It is probably worth mentioning at this point that Superman’s myth has proved uniquely open to interpretation and appropriation over the years. One long-running, semi-serious theory claims Superman is Jewish, not just because of his Jewish creators (Siegel and Shuster) and his Kryptonian name (Kal-El, reminiscent of the Hebrew for voice and God) but because his origin myth echoes that of Moses, with the baby found in a crashed rocket rather than a reed basket. All three of the most recent silver screen incarnations of the Man of Steel have meanwhile played up the Christian parallels of the Superman myth, by variously referring to the infant superhero as the ‘saviour’ of the human race, having him fly in the shape of a cross and placing his age at the suitably biblical thirty-three. (Then there is the fact that the words Lucifer in Lex Luthor and cleric in Clark Kent can be unearthed…). But one of the most attractive theories about Superman’s lasting appeal comes from the Scottish comics creator Grant Morrison. In his book Supergods, Morrison proposed that the current mass-media frenzy for superheroes addresses a deep and specific cultural need. As technological progress and medical science rush forward, he suggested, we look to superhero myths for guidance in approaching our own enhanced scope and reach – in everything from biomedical enhancements to flying robot armies. The heroes offer, he concluded, “a bright flickering sign of our need to move on, to imagine the better, more just and more proactive people we can be”. If you’re one of the few who hasn’t yet been to see Man of Steel, this, at least, is a heartening frame of mind in which to approach what might otherwise be regarded as just another run-of-the-mill blockbuster.

]]>https://ashsilverlock.com/2013/07/06/man-and-superman/feed/8ashsilverlockSupermanBatman_LeeOne Hundred Realmshttps://ashsilverlock.com/2013/02/28/one-hundred-realms/
https://ashsilverlock.com/2013/02/28/one-hundred-realms/#commentsThu, 28 Feb 2013 02:00:50 +0000http://ashsilverlock.com/?p=1084As Fabulous Realms has today reached the milestone of one hundred posts, I thought it would be the perfect opportunity to do something that I’ve been planning to do for some time. Long-time followers of this blog will be aware that I regularly put the spotlight on a ‘mythic archetype’ or fantasy genre, draw out its identifying features and provide what are in my view some of the finest examples of the form. Along the right hand side of this blog site, you’ll see that I’ve grouped my posts into general categories, many of which are self-explanatory but some of which may require a little more in the way of explanation for the casual reader or non-fantasy fan. What do I mean when I talk about ‘Sword & Sorcery’, for instance, and is this the same thing as ‘Epic’ or ‘High’ fantasy? What’s the difference between ‘Urban fantasy’ and ‘Contemporary fantasy’, and where does ‘Paranormal Romance’ fit in? Is ‘Dark fantasy’ the same as horror and is ‘Science fantasy’ the same as science fiction? These questions may or may not have exercised you at one time or another but I thought that it might, all the same, be interesting to explore the – not quite one hundred – ‘Fabulous Realms’ of fantasy fiction in search of answers.

Below, what I’ve tried to do is split up the fantasy genre, classify its sub-genres and provide some of the best examples of each. Part of the difficulty with doing this is that, of course, many books (and authors) can be filed under multiple genres, but I hope what I’ve done makes some sort of sense nevertheless. So, without further ado, this is it, my almost all-encompassing fantasy family tree:

‘Pure’ Fantasy

This is my own umbrella term for a number of related fantasy sub-genres, including High, Epic, Arthurian and Heroic fantasy, as well as Sword & Sorcery. Epic fantasy is, in a nutshell, any book or set of books where a bunch of people try to save the world, sometimes several times over. Notable for its intricate plots, Epic fantasy is also distinguished by having large casts of characters, a threat to the world and an earth-shattering war of some kind. It is also usually set exclusively in a secondary world (i.e. not our own world and time) and the over-arching plot is more important than the plots of individual novels. At its very best, Epic fantasy creates vivid worlds of heroism and sacrifice. At its worst, its primary characteristic is enormously thick books, where ideas run out long before the pages. The greatest initial influence on Epic fantasy was of course J R R Tolkien and the Professor’s hand can also be glimpsed clearly in the formation of the related sub-genre of High fantasy. Featuring similarly labyrinthine plots and lengthy lists of characters, High fantasy is distinguished from Epic fantasy mainly by the absence of shades of grey: heroes are typically whiter than white while villains are nothing more than ciphers. Absence of moral ambiguity is made up for by complex historical, cultural and magical detail – a High fantasy novel almost always features a glossary, appendix, index or some combination of all three.

The flipside of Epic and High fantasy is Heroic fantasy, a sub-genre which does what it says on the tin in focusing on heroes. Here we’re not just talking about heroes in the sense of the main protagonists in novels, we’re talking about larger-than-life characters with magic swords, world-changing destinies and, often, some sort of distinguishing physical characteristic – think Michael Moorcock’s Elric of Melnibone, Robert E Howard’s Conan the Barbarian or David Gemmell’s Druss the Legend. Heroic fantasy is heavily influenced by folklore and mythology, which itself featured ‘hero’ characters like King Arthur, Finn MacCool and Gilgamesh, and for this reason does not need to be set wholly in a secondary world, like Epic or High fantasy. Characters like Elric and Conan belong equally in the Sword & Sorcery genre, which in many ways was the precursor to Tolkienesque fantasy, born in the pulp magazines of the 1920s and 30s, like Weird Tales. S&S is a different beast to Epic or High fantasy, often being set in some antediluvian epoch of Earth rather than a secondary world. Its heroes, consequently, are often wily, amoral types trying to get by – think Fritz Leiber’s Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser, for example. Last of the traditional fantasy sub-genres which bucks the trend of Epic and High fantasy is the rather new concept of ‘Low’ fantasy. Low fantasy’s heroes tend to be more flawed, more tired and more grubby than their High fantasy counterparts – they have had hard lives and often have dark secrets as a consequence (or they’re just plain not nice people). The crux is this – in High fantasy books by J R R Tolkien and Robert Jordan, heroes have adventures; in Low fantasy books by George R R Martin and Joe Abercrombie, characters endure hardship, disease, torture, rain, rough sex and sewers. It’s like the difference between the Beatles and the Rolling Stones really!

Horror-influenced Fantasy

This is the category in which I’ve placed such sub-genres as Dark fantasy, Paranormal Romance, Urban fantasy and Weird Fiction. Some may question the classification of such fields within the wider area of fantasy at all, but the fantastical link is definitely there, however faint. A product of the 1980s and authors such as Clive Barker and Neil Gaiman, Dark fantasy could in a sense be regarded more as an evolution of horror than of fantasy. What it shares with mainstream fantasy, however, is the nature of the peril – magic. Where Dark fantasy differs is in the effect – magic here is evil, pure and simple; it invariably destroys the minds of those it encounters and is not regarded as an accepted part of the fabric of life. In this it shares kinship with the sub-genre of Weird Fiction, however, ultimately Dark fantasy tends to deal with the evil in human minds, and not that which lurks outside. In the Weird Fiction of HP Lovecraft, William Hope Hodgson, Clark Ashton Smith and others, however, man is an insignificance, for ranged against him are ancient and uncaring powers. This outer terror of the cosmic threat posed by unimaginably powerful beings is the antithesis of Dark fantasy, which fears the darkness within the soul of humankind.

On a slightly lighter note, we have the closely related sub-genres of Urban and Contemporary fantasy. These might seem like different names for what is essentially the same thing, but the fractures become evident on a closer inspection. Urban fantasy is unswervingly city-based. At one extreme it touches the vampire-filled world of Harry Dresden, at the other the intellectualism of Perdido Street Station, but either way, the city itself is a key character. In many ways a sub-sub-genre within Urban fantasy, Paranormal Romance dilutes the peril of the undead with romantic, vampiric anti-heroes. Dominated by female writers like Charlaine Harris and Laurell K Hamilton, there are four main parts to a Paranormal Romance: a hidden world, so bursting with supernatural types it’s a surprise it is hidden; a dynamic, sexual heroine; a mostly urban setting; and shoes. A different creature altogether is Contemporary fantasy – unlike Dark fantasy in that its magic has good and bad sides, it is far less interested in the gooey stuff than Paranormal Romance and more interested in country than Urban fantasy’s town. Contemporary fantasy draws on folklore, where secret worlds intersect with our own. A great deal of children’s fantasy comes under this umbrella – think Harry Potter – but adult writers are like Robert Holdstock and Charles de Lint have equally made it their own.

SF-influenced Fantasy

The most startling example of the intersection between science-fiction and fantasy is the dynamic genre of Steampunk. In Steampunk, the grandeur of Victoriana blends with modern technology. Futuristic innovations and anachronistic technology in vintage settings like nineteenth century London or the Wild West are the hallmarks of the sub-genre. Other typical trappings of Steampunk include faster-than-sound airships, brass robots, wooden computers, ornate submarines, baroque time machines and a wide variety of extraordinary devices that are too numerous to mention. Although many works now considered seminal to the genre were published in the 1960s and 1970s, the term Steampunk originated in the late 1980s as a tongue in cheek variant of Cyberpunk. The genre’s origins can, however, be traced back even earlier, to the scientific romances that first inspired science-fiction in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, such as the works of H G Wells, Jules Verne and Mary Shelley. Modern standard bearers of steampunk include some highly respected authors whose work has passed into the mainstream, including Philip Pullman, China Mieville and Tim Powers. Even more intriguingly, while most of the original steampunk novels had a historical setting, later works have often placed steampunk elements in a fantasy world with little relation to any specific historical era.

Science fantasy is a sub-genre which, in contrast to Steampunk, may seem less familiar and less identifiable to many fantasy fans. Here, what I’m referring to is fantasy that uses overt or implied science-fictional tropes, often in conjunction with the deep time of Weird Fiction and the brassy landscapes of Sword & Sorcery. This sub-genre is occupied by authors such as Jack Vance, Gene Wolfe and M John Harrison, whose stories are set so far in the future that the world’s civilizations are torpid, its inhabitants are exotic, and the technology they possess, and barely understand, appears magical. Often, a sense of grave and all-encompassing melancholy pervades the landscape. Many would dispute the categorization of Frank Herbert’s Dune novels as Science fantasy rather than pure SF but this is definitely an arguable distinction. This sub-genre is also exemplified by Pern, an SF world in fantasy dress. (The more perceptive among you will also have noticed that my own novel White Planet, also sits firmly in this particular category!).

There are many more sub-genres within fantasy which I could mention: Animal fantasy, as distinguished by the novels of Richard Adams and William Horwood; Arthurian fantasy, as written by T H White and Marion Zimmer Bradley; Comic fantasy, in the form of Terry Pratchett’s books; and many many more. Ultimately, however, the question that may be asked is: do any of these classifications really matter? I personally tend to look just for a good book and am not too concerned by what specific sub-genre of fantasy it falls into. What the above shows, however, is the sheer range and variety within the fantasy genre – there is quite literally something for everyone out there. That’s why the central purpose of this blog has always been celebrating worlds of fantasy, folklore, myth and legend from every era and every corner of the world, and that’s what I plan to do for the next one hundred posts!

]]>https://ashsilverlock.com/2013/02/28/one-hundred-realms/feed/8ashsilverlockBarbarians at the Gate!https://ashsilverlock.com/2012/09/21/slaine-the-barbarian/
https://ashsilverlock.com/2012/09/21/slaine-the-barbarian/#commentsFri, 21 Sep 2012 04:00:36 +0000http://ashsilverlock.com/?p=703What is it that makes barbarian characters so popular and appealing? The original barbarians – the Huns, the Goths, the Gauls, the Saxons, Jutes and Picts etc – were history’s Hell’s Angels, credited with nothing less than bringing about the fall of western civilisation and the onset of the Dark Ages. They were anything but heroic, yet their fantasy equivalents are some of the most enduring and well known characters in the genre. Few have not heard of Conan, Robert E Howard’s muscle-bound anti-hero (although in fairness that may have more to do with Arnold Schwarzenegger than the character on the printed page). Of rather more respectable vintage are Druss, axe-wielding hero of many of David Gemmell’s Drenai heroic fantasy novels, and Fritz Leiber’s Fafhrd in the Lankhmar novels. Barbarian warriors are also, of course, a staple of role-playing games. In this medium they are often represented as lone warriors, very different from the vibrant historical cultures on which they are based. Several characteristics are commonly shared, including physical prowess and fighting skill combined with a fierce temper and a tolerance for pain. No doubt due to their animal magnetism (though not to their general lack of personal hygiene) they appear to be irresistible to the opposite gender, and seem to possess an equal appetite for food and drink. While Conan, Druss and Fafhrd are all fairly standard examples of this archetype, the graphic novel character Sláine is a somewhat more ambiguous and intriguing take on the classic barbarian.

The British comic strip 2000 AD is best known for its future wars and sci-fi dystopias but, in 1983, it made a marked departure into fantasy – but with a twist. Sláine is a barbarian fantasy adventure series based on Celtic myths and legends. Subtle it ain’t: the eponymous hero wields an axe called ‘brain biter’ and the power of the ‘warp spasm’. This is Sláine’s terrifying ability (based on the ríastrad or body-distorting battle frenzy of the Irish hero Cúchulainn) to turn into a frightening, monstrous figure who knows neither friend nor foe, as a result of calling on the power of his patron, the earth goddess Danu, to ‘warp’ his body. Whilst Sláine’s most obvious source is Irish mythology (based on the Cúchulainn reference), it also owes a significant debt to Robert Howard’s Conan the Barbarian (although it must be said that Howard himself drew heavily on Celtic myth, as is evidenced in part by the Irish name of his own barbarian hero). However, Sláine is in no way bogged down by its mythological precedents – it is brutal, thuggish and often played for dark laughs against a backdrop of ancient culture and flights of fancy. Set in the ‘Land of the Young’ of pre-Roman Ireland, Sláine is a ne’er-do-well banished for getting the king’s favourite pregnant, before eventually uniting his tribe and becoming the first High King of Ireland. Together with his ever-present companion, chronicler and comedy sidekick Ukko, Sláine MacRoth is the ultimate bad boy of fantasy, complete with his very own memorable battle cry: “Kiss my axe!”.

Sláine’s creator, Pat Mills, came up with the character partly out of a desire to explore his own Irish roots but also because, in his own words, he wanted to avoid creating a “muscle-bound git”. Despite being a barbarian character, Sláine is a sinewy warrior, exuding menace and brutish charm (even sporting an eighties’ mullet). As well as standing out from 2000 AD’s other, predominantly sci-fi fare due to its fantasy nature, the strip was different in other ways. Mills ensured that Sláine was deliberately illustrative, combining features of folk art with a much more European sensibility, while much of 2000 AD’s stable was more simple and action-packed. This was epic storytelling, where the line between fantasy and reality was blurred, mixing gods, monsters and historical figures. With nods to everything from Celtic legends of the Tain all the way through to Robert Graves’ The White Goddess, Mills wove an incredibly rich tapestry of stories. He wanted to see ancient Celtic legends brought to life and also to challenge the way that history and myths were represented. But it is not just Mills that deserves credit for the success of the Sláine comic strip, for the series benefited from the start by having an awesome roster of the very best in British artistic talent contributing to it.

Sláine was initially drawn by Mills’ then wife, Angela Kincaid, who soon bowed out to be replaced by Mick McMahon, among others. Better known for his work on Judge Dredd, McMahon evolved a painstakingly detailed style, with hatching and body shapes creating almost a woodcut effect and enhancing the epic feel. Italian artist Massimo Belardinelli then added a beautiful, phantasmagorical element to the series, which was probably the closest the comic strip ever came to exploring its fantasy roots. But what undoubtedly made Sláine a hit was the epic 31-part The Horned God series. This was illustrated by Simon Bisley, who developed a stunning, painted style that simultaneously showed just what was possible with graphic novel fantasy art and launched a whole slew of imitators on an unsuspecting public. The Horned God instantly made Bisley a comic book superstar as well as giving 2000 AD a classic of the medium that was acknowledged across the world. In particular, partly due to the revolutionary techniques of its artists, Sláine was a huge hit in Europe – a first for a British comic strip.

Many felt that Sláine could have bowed out on a high with The Horned God but the strip continued into the nineties – not always with great results it has to be said. Many readers felt that it had lost its fantastical foundations and wearied of what they saw as a succession of increasingly thin plots. After the glory of Bisley’s run, the artwork also lost focus, never really settling and remaining overshadowed by what had gone before. In fact, The Secret Commonwealth storyline was so poorly received that Sláine was rested for 3 years, before returning with The Books of Invasions in the new millennium. Although disliked by many long-term readers, this saga, with its epic, widescreen storytelling, was a big seller. Thanks to a combination of artwork and interlocking story lines, therefore, Sláine has endured while other eighties icons of 2000 AD, such as Rogue Trooper, have waned. After such a varied journey, where the barbaric Sláine’s adventures will take him next is anyone’s guess…

]]>https://ashsilverlock.com/2012/09/21/slaine-the-barbarian/feed/3ashsilverlockslaine1Well Met in Lankhmarhttps://ashsilverlock.com/2012/04/27/well-met-in-lankhmar/
https://ashsilverlock.com/2012/04/27/well-met-in-lankhmar/#commentsFri, 27 Apr 2012 05:00:09 +0000http://ashsilverlock.com/?p=475There are many memorable pairings of hero and sidekick in the fantasy genre – Frodo and Sam, Elric and Moonglum, Harry and Hedwig (or Ron and Hermione if you prefer). This is mirrored in science fiction by pairings such as Han and Chewie, Kirk and Spock, Doctor Who and his innumerable lovely assistants. In mythology, where would Robin Hood be without Little John, Gilgamesh without Enkidu? In all of my reading, however, I have never come across anything to match Fritz Leiber’s incomparable fantasy pairing of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser. Fafhrd is a seven foot tall northern barbarian; Mouser is a small, mercurial thief, once known just as Mouse, and a former wizard’s apprentice. They are perfect foils for each other: Fafhrd talks like a romantic, but his strong practicality usually wins through, while the cynical-sounding Mouser is prone to showing strains of sentiment at unexpected times. Both are rogues, existing within a decadent world where to be so is a requirement of survival. They spend a lot of time drinking, feasting, wenching, brawling, stealing and gambling, and are seldom fussy about who hires their swords. But they are humane and – most of all – relish true adventure. Together, Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser are truly the Butch and Sundance of the fantasy genre.

Fritz Leiber not only invented the phrase ‘sword and sorcery’, but was also one of the earliest and wittiest masters of this vein of heroic fantasy. His famous northern barbarian and his nimble, devious companion first saw print in 1939 and pursued their adventures and swordplay for more than 40 years thereafter. Back to back, eyeing their foes over the gleam of sharpened steel, Fafhrd, the giant warrior from the Cold Waste, and the Gray Mouser, novice wizard, master thief and unparalleled swordsman, stood as the two greatest heroes ever to walk the world of Newhon. Most of their exploits originated in the inexhaustibly colourful and sleazy city of Lankhmar, moving with breathtaking speed between farce, tragedy, bizarre ruses and desperate swordplay. An instant success upon publication, part of what made Fritz Leiber’s stories of the daring duo so appealing was his mastery of language – his words sing and the vividness of his descriptions bring his characters and settings alive seemingly effortlessly. For any fantasy reader out there driven to despair by the plodding, samey prose of most contemporary writers in the genre, Leiber’s books will undoubtedly seem like a breath of fresh air with their wit, verve and fluency. You really get the feeling that the writer is enjoying Fafhrd and Mouser’s adventures almost as much as they are!

Leiber’s own favourite story was Bazaar of the Bizarre, his comic-sinister version of the traditional Magic Shop story, where the goods are rubbish disguised by illusion-spells and the haplessly bedazzled Mouser has no idea that the shop’s gorgeous caged girls are in reality giant spiders. Not only is this tale an excellent introduction to fantasy’s best-loved pair of heroic rogues, it also illustrate’s Leiber’s narrative genius perfectly – he packs more into one paragraph than most others take a chapter to, telling a story with depth, detail, and clarity in a sophisticated yet economical style. Despite Leiber’s death and all the intervening years, I really don’t feel that the Lankhmar tales have aged at all. Ground-breaking at the time that they were published, Leiber’s stories remain refreshing to this day precisely because they don’t deal with world-saving heroics and nauseatingly brave, honourable central characters, but instead feature two rough, eccentric, greedy, selfish, self-assured drunkards, in behaviour and manners more resembling the common man than most sword and sorcery heroes.

Although one story takes place on Earth, the Fafhrd and Gray Mouser tales are for the most part set in the fictional world of Nehwon, described as ‘a world like and unlike our own’. Theorists in Nehwon believe that it may be shaped like a bubble, floating in the waters of eternity, and its technology varies between the Iron Age and the Medieval. The series includes many bizarre and outlandish characters, such as Ningauble of the Seven Eyes and Sheelba of the Eyeless Face. With their sorcerous advice, these two often lead the (anti)heroic pair into some of their most interesting and dangerous adventures. Although Leiber credited his friend, Harry Otto Fischer, with the original concepts for the characters, it was Leiber himself who wrote nearly all the stories – an incredible feat given that the first appeared in Unknown in 1939 and the last in The Knight and Knave of Swords in 1988. Intriguingly, it is often suggested that the characters were loosely modelled upon Leiber and Fischer. Despite Fafhrd and Mouser’s largely unreconstructed nature, in later stories the two mature and eventually settle down with new female partners on the Iceland-like Rime Isle. Leiber had long contemplated continuing the series beyond this point, but died in 1992 before he managed to do so. He has however left a lasting and iconic legacy in the form of his two heroes and has achieved perhaps the ultimate accolade in fantasy – his famous characters were parodied by Terry Pratchett in the very first Discworld novel!

]]>https://ashsilverlock.com/2012/04/27/well-met-in-lankhmar/feed/14ashsilverlockmouse1[8]The Dark Courthttps://ashsilverlock.com/2012/03/30/the-dark-court/
https://ashsilverlock.com/2012/03/30/the-dark-court/#commentsFri, 30 Mar 2012 07:00:33 +0000http://ashsilverlock.com/?p=441Everyone has a clear idea of how fantasy elves – as opposed to their fairy tale counterparts – look and act. They are ancient and wise and possess both great nobility and power. In form Elves stand as tall as men – taller than some – though they are of slighter build and greater grace. They revel in the wonders of nature, the beauty of songs and tales, the glimmer of the stars, and the voice of the waters. They are not always called Elves but, whether it is Tolkien’s Eldar, Guy Gavriel Kay’s Lios Alfar, Tad Williams’ Sithi, Raymond E Feist’s Eledhel, Michael Moorcock’s Melniboneans or Katherine Kerr’s Elycion Lacar, these common features make them unmistakable as a fantasy archetype. In the worlds of fantasy role-playing there are numerous divisions and subdivisions of this proud, noble and ancient race – High Elves, Wood Elves, Half-Elves, Wild Elves, Sea Elves, Deep Elves – the list goes on and on. But there is one Elvish race that pops up time and time again in almost every fantasy world, one that is as synonymous with darkness as their fair cousins are with light and goodness. They have many names – Drow, Moredhel, Dark Eldar, Svart Alfar, Norns – but they are best known as Dark Elves.

Dark Elves have actually been around in mythology almost as long as Elves themselves – Celtic folklore in particular is full of tales of the Dark or Unseelie Court, causing mischief and mayhem for both humans and their Light or Seelie Court counterparts. They are also referenced as Dokkalfar or Svart Alfar in the Norse myths. In the Eddas Dark Elves were not truly evil as such, they could mainly be distinguished from Lios Alfar (or ‘Light Elves’) by the fact that they dwelt within the earth and were mostly swarthy, while their cousins lived in Alfheim, located in heaven, and were said to be fairer than the sun to look at. There also seems to have been some overlap between Svart Alfar and Dwarves, although this is done away with by Tolkien in his legendarium, which refers to them as two different races. Tolkien’s Moriquendi seem to be the origin of Dark Elves in fantasy fiction because it is in them that the term ‘Dark’ is first given a specifically negative connotation. In Tolkien’s world, from the beginning there was a division between the Elves who desired the light of the Undying Lands versus Elves who did not wish to leave Middle Earth, implying that these ‘Dark’ Elves willingly tolerated the shadows that the Dark Lord Morgoth had put upon Middle Earth.

The creators of fantasy role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons picked up on this distinction and ran with it in their fictional race, the Drow. In fact the term ‘Drow’ comes from mythology rather than fiction. In the folkloric traditions of the Orkney and Shetland islands a Drow is a small, troll-like fairy creature, in general inclined to be short of stature, ugly and both shy and mischievous in nature. Like the troll of Scandinavian legend, with which the Drow (sometimes spelt ‘Trow’) shares many similarities, they are nocturnal creatures; venturing out of their ‘knowes’ (earthen mound dwellings) solely in the evening. Although in D&D the Drow are sinister and evil rather than merely mischievous, it is interesting to note that they retain this nocturnal, subterranean nature. The Drow perhaps encapsulate what are considered the common characteristics of Dark Elves, being known for their aggression, deceit, and stealth. They are brutal and cruel by nature, having little mercy when it comes to cheating, fighting, or anything dealing with the life of another being. They have little respect for even their own kind, at times waging war against each other. However, clans are known to band together, to combat invasions and attacks by other races. They do not mix blood with other races. They lurk in dark places and love the shadows. Rarely will they come into the light for needless purposes, but it is not usually believed light will harm or weaken them. Their weakness varies upon legend, and may include excessive heat, rain, nettles, or the blossoms of some plants and trees. Dark elves generally travel in pairs or groups, as their tendencies towards cheating and theft make them targets for retaliation and violence at the hands of other races.

The above seems to be the template that has been followed both in fantasy fiction and other role-playing worlds ever since. For instance, the Dark Elves of the Warhammer World have lived in exile in Naggaroth, the Land of Chill, ever since they made war on their hated enemies the High Elves under the leadership of Malekith the Witch King. Tad Williams’ Norns are a more elegant version of the Drow, who also live in the coldest part of his fantasy world of Osten Ard, paying tribute to their undead ruler, Ineluki the Storm King. It is the D&D fantasy setting that has produced one of the most famous Dark Elves in fiction – Drizzt Do’Urden – who, in contrast to his dastardly brethren, is actually that rare thing for a Drow, brave, noble and self-sacrificing. Another iconic Dark Elf is Nerevar, the legendary Hortator and King of the Chimer from the fantasy world of The Elder Scrolls. Technically, he is not necessarily a Dark Elf in the game, depending on the player’s race, but he is the reincarnation of the Chimer Nerevar Indoril, once king of Morrowind. Going back to the world of Warhammer, I have to mention one of my favourite graphic novel anti-heroes, the Black Library’s very own Malus Darkblade, a latter-day Elf With No Name, riding his giant lizard across the wastes of Naggaroth righting wrongs and generally kicking butt! One thing is for sure, whether they are playing the role of good guys or villains, the Dark Elf is a mysterious, alluring and constantly evolving fantasy archetype and one that I’m sure is here to stay.